Curator's Journals Project / Corcoran Gallery of Art

The Corcoran Gallery of Art is currently working on a project to transcribe, annotate, index, and publish the Journals of the Gallery's first director/curator, William MacLeod (1811-1892).

The Journals are a unique and valuable series of volumes that are not only important to the history of American art, but also to Washington history, museum studies, administrative history, and American studies. Comprised of 2,300 handwritten pages, they offer a detailed look at the day-to-day administration of the Gallery from 1876 to 1884 and during 1886. Their breadth of detail on non-administrative subjects – such as historical events and Washington society –make them an invaluable resource for researchers investigating the development of cultural institutions, the role of art education, the status of women in the arts, and various topics beyond the field of art history.

The Journals provide a daily record of MacLeod’s administration of the Gallery, one of the three oldest continuously operating art museums in the United States (after the Wadsworth Athenaeum and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts). MacLeod’s entries contain his comments on a wide variety of subjects related to the Gallery’s operation, including the artists, patrons, and art dealers who visited the building, acquisitions, the formation of the Corcoran School of Art, correspondence, and Washington society. MacLeod also, however, recorded personal observations.

:: View selected excerpts from William MacLeod's journal entries.

The breadth of commentary offered in the entries makes the Journals an invaluable source of information on 19th-century American art and artists. MacLeod mentions nearly every painter of note active before 1900, including Albert Bierstadt, Richard Norris Brooke, Gilbert Stuart, John Singleton Copley, Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Sully, Thomas Cole, William Trost Richards, Charles Willson Peale, Titian Peale, George P. A. Healy, Emmanuel Leutze, Robert Swain Gifford, Daniel Huntington, Frederick Kensett, and Thomas Moran.

Publishing the Journals as a book that provides context and explanatory texts will make this exhaustive resource more widely available to scholars, students, and others researchers in a multitude of disciplines. The annotations, appendices, illustrations, and editorial matter will add new dimensions to their utility. Using the published edition, researchers will be able to: consult a biographical directory for information on someone mentioned in the text or find his or her birth dates in the appropriate index entry; examine an illustration of a painting described in an entry; or consult the subject index and consult the next entry on a similar topic.

The Curator’s Journals project was begun with a grant from the National Historical Records and Publications Commission and private donors.